“OK, Ted. You have my attention, and I assume you have a plan.”
“I do. Can you get to Chicago Executive Airport tomorrow after rehearsal?”
“I can be there in about an hour, I guess. So, 1:00 or 1:30 depending on traffic. You flying in?”
“Nope. I’ll have a little plane for you. Why don’t you fly down, and we’ll eat at that little café with the great bacon.” The café Ted was talking about was a little hole in the wall in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Al loved that café. They had the best bacon he’d ever eaten.
“Is something heavy going down?”
“Nothing like that at all. I want to work something out with you and I need to do it in person.”
“This doesn’t involve killing me and leaving me in a shallow grave, does it?”
“I’d bury you deep, Al. Be too much work to dig a hole that big, so I guess I won’t kill you.” He laughed again. “It’s nothing like that, and you might even get a kick out of it.”
“Can I bring a friend?”
“Is she cute?”
“Who said it was a girl?” Al asked. After a full thirty seconds of silence, he added, “Cute isn’t the word I’d put on it, but she is easy on the eyes, yes.”
“Bring her if you want. She’ll have to take a stroll during part of our talk, but you may as well bring company. Our meeting will be pretty short. We can catch up, talk business, eat good food, then I gotta head back over to Louisiana. Got some shit brewing out there.”
“So you are flying me to Hattiesburg to have a late lunch or early dinner?”
“Your tax dollars at work for you. It’ll be fun.” There was a voice in the background that said something about shaking a leg. “I have to go, Al. Shit never stops rolling here. So tomorrow around 5:30, someone will pick you up at the Hattiesburg Airport. Shit. Might even be me. Gotta run.” And Ted was off the phone.
Al had left the shower on, and it was running hot now. He got in and scrubbed his short hair. He was soaping up his chest and parts south as he thought about the call. Ted must have some reason to have him come down for a face-to-face, but it didn’t sound like work exactly. It really didn’t matter. He was going to go check it out. He’d ask Frieda if she wanted to take a short trip. If she didn’t want to go, he might ask Sunny. He just didn’t want to fly all that way alone on his short time off. Aside from that, being flown on a small plane was cool and he wanted to share that with someone. He wasn’t ready for a relationship, but he did find himself missing having a person to share things with.
He got out, dried off, and put on some light cologne. It was really just an essential oil blend: cedar wood, frankincense, and palmarosa. He used very little of it, but it was an earthy and relaxing scent. He enjoyed smelling it lightly on his skin, and he hadn’t had any complaints from people he’d been around. At least not yet.
He’d just put on his sweats, t-shirt, and slippers, when there was a knock at the door. He looked out the peephole and saw Edith, her black bob hairdo perfect, and her lips puckered into a kissy face and painted a deep purple. He let her in and handed her a White Russian. He’d mixed it before putting on his sweats.
“You’re prompt. I like prompt.”
“You have a White Russian. I like prepared.” She took the glass from him, kissed him on the cheek, then went and sat on the bed. “I’m fucking beat. Been writing papers because I’m done with your work and can’t do anymore until I get further instructions.” She was taking off her black high-top Doc Martins. She was wearing a canvas skirt that looked more like a black kilt than anything else. She had a black t-shirt with the collar cut out, a black choker with an ivory cameo on it, and, as she took off her leather jacket, he could see a lacy bra strap that matched her lipstick perfectly. He saw she was a little older than he’d thought she was in the café. In the café, he’d thought she was in her mid to late twenties. In here, up close and with better lighting, he guessed her to be closed to thirty-five, maybe on the far side of that. She had perfect skin that didn’t seem to acknowledge the movement of time.
“What did you find out?” He asked, trying to ignore his heart trip hammering in his chest. Frieda was beautiful, and Sunny was cute. Edith was sexy in a raw and vital way. If Frieda was a Bentley, and Sunny was a convertible T-bird, Edith was a 1982 Corvette Stingray in mint condition.
She set her drink on the nightstand with a sigh and reached for her ancient mail carrier’s bag. “All work and no play makes Al a shitty date.” There was an impish smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. She stood and headed toward the small table by the window. “Come on, you big lug nut. You’re so hot to see what I found, let’s start tearing into it. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty keyed up about it.” She sat at the table and opened her bag. She pulled out a big file that was packed with hard copies of stuff and held together with a large, industrial-looking rubber band. “I made a bunch of copies because you look like you like to scribble on stuff.”
“I do.” He was heading over to his bag and grabbing a couple of sharpened Ticonderoga pencils. “If you want to fire up your computer, I have internet here.”
“I don’t want to log onto wireless from the hotel’s Wi-Fi. If I need to get on I’ll use this.” She opened her bag and flashed what looked like an old dialup modem. “Dial-up is slow as fuck, but it’s the most secure thing I have here. We won’t need it. I made lots of copies.” She pulled a second folder out of her bag.
“Let me make a quick call. I think we’re gonna be busy for a while.”
“The man sees the light! I’ll make another drink while you make your call. Want one?”
“Don’t drink, but help yourself. Doesn’t bug me in the least.”
Edith went and made another White Russian. Al called Frieda, who was still at the office. “Hey, Free.”
“Ugh. I was going to call you. I’m buried in paperwork right now. I wanted to get it all done tonight, but there’s a bunch of payroll shit that Marty sprung on me. I’m gonna be fuckin swamped until August. Can we skip tonight? I don’t want to, but this stuff isn’t an option.”
“Not a problem. Matter of fact, I was calling to ask if we could reschedule anyway. I’ve got a bunch of information from Edith, that computer girl I found the other night, and I need to mow through it. What’s your weekend like?”
“We’re closing The Rivals, so I have to be around and look official. You want a ticket for Saturday?”
“I have to go on a quick trip. Nothing important. A friend of mine is flying me down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to look at some stuff from an old case. No biggie. I’ll be back Saturday night, or I might stay and come back on Sunday.”
“Take Sunny.”
“What?”
“You should take Sunny. She’s got a big crush on you and she needs a break. I feel like you and I are clicking, but I don’t think we’re going to have time to cultivate anything. I think it might get complicated if I got involved with you, Al. I want to, but I’m scared I might lose focus. I’m not saying leave me alone; fuck, not at all. I just think you should have some fun. I take a couple of vacations a year to decompress, but decompression as a regular part of my life just doesn’t happen. When I’m running this place, it’ll be a different story.”
“Don’t worry. I totally get it. Do your work. I may take Sunny.” He was looking at Edith’s lean and muscular back. “I may just sneak away. I got a ton of information to slog through. Go work. Don’t forget to eat. I’ll come say hi to you tomorrow morning before rehearsal. I’ll bring you some Earl Gray. OK?”
“Yes, sir.” She sounded dejected but resigned to her life choice. “Thanks, Al. You’re easy to deal with. I appreciate it.”
“Back at you. G’night.”
“Everything straightened out with the wife?” Edith was grinning again.
“I am blissfully unattached, please and thank you. How much time are we going to spend doing this? I only ask because at some point we’ll have to order food, or I’ll have to kill you
and eat you.”
“You won’t have to kill me.” That smile again.
He clumsily ignored the overture. “Someone told me Gino’s East was still great. Meat lovers.”
“Meat is murder and murder tastes good.”
“I’ll have them pitch a meat pizza out here in a little bit.”
“Do it now. They take about an hour, and I’ll be hungry by then.”
Al found the number, ordered the pizza, and told the guy he’d pay cash. He said the tip would be huge if they actually remembered to bring parmesan cheese and crushed red peppers. He sat down next to Edith at the table. She scooted her chair over next to him, sliding the first folder in front of the two of them. She turned to him and said, “Al?”
He turned and she grabbed the front of his t-shirt and gave him a deep and probing kiss. “There. That’s better. Now we can look at this stuff without any weird tension.”
Al, who was now feeling a tension that definitely was not weird said, “You’re pretty fuckin’ mercurial, you know that?”
“I’m impulsive, smart, and decisive. It gets me in trouble sometimes, but mostly it makes my life a lot of fun. I used to be a normal run-of-the-mill house wife. I was married for five years. Then one day I woke up, looked at my husband and said, ‘Joe? Are you happy?’ He said no. We cried. I took a whack at studying computers. I was a shitty student in high school. I taught myself everything I could about computers. I was good at it. So I started doing some apprentice hacking. I’m going to school right now with the goal of becoming a lawyer.”
“Lawyers are all assholes.” Al hated lawyers.
“Yup, but I want to make sure information stays free and we retain some privacy rights. The way things are going, the NSA probably knows if I shave my pubic hair.”
“The NSA gets all the good information.”
She looked deeply into his eyes and said, “Patience, Mr. Al. Everything will be revealed in time.” She sipped her drink and opened the first folder.
27
Edith went through the first folder with Al. It was full of accidental deaths and murders of people that were identified as “workers in the entertainment industry.” At first, it seemed like an unusually large number of cases.
“Keep in mind, Al, that I’ve included all people with any ties to entertainment in any way--technical workers, performers, singers, dancers, magicians…”
“Good. People should off magicians more often. Sorry. Continue.”
“I also included close calls I could find. I still didn’t feel like I had a big enough search pool to draw from, so I expanded to areas within a reasonable driving distance from Chicago. I set that value at fifty miles. It’s a large area, but we want to include as much as we can before we start to exclude. You follow so far?”
“Yeah. I just don’t know how you’re going to narrow this down into a usable-sized pool.”
“Well, Al, meet Folder B.” She slid the first folder out of the way and put the next folder on the table in front of them. It was a large accordion folder with several compartments. “I was thinking about this Dirk guy. What makes him particular?”
“I should stop you there. I have a folder of my own.”
“Were my folders threatening your masculinity?”
“A little, so I brought this to the party. It’s a woman who was involved in theatre. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. It’s a closed case. They assumed it was a suicide, but it smelled fishy to me.” He opened the Mary folder. There were pictures and file notes, all stamped with Property of Chicago PD.
“Looks like someone’s getting some inside help.”
“Yeah. I got a guy. Anyway, there’s this one and a floater I checked out tonight. Another theatre guy.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Cool. This’ll tell me if some of my assumptions were right. First, we need to get the commonalities of these folks. Do you have some blank paper? I thought we could write notes and tape them on the walls.”
Al looked at her. “Does looking at stuff like that help you think?”
“No, but it’s a detective-y thing to do, dontcha think?” She gave him a half nudge, half body-to-body rub.
“OK.” He said getting up and grabbing a legal pad. “We have Dirk. Mid-forties. Male. Been in Chicago theatre over twenty-five years. He was an actor who worked in Chicago most of the time. He did some fight choreography, as well, sword fights and fist fights for the stage. He was what we call ‘Chicago-based.’ His local union was the Chicago Equity office. By all accounts, competent at what he did, albeit people thought he was sort of a below-average person.”
“Below-average?”
“Dirk was a dick.”
“Got it. Mary…”
“St. Claire. She was a Chicago actor, as well. She’d dropped out of mainstream stuff and was more concerned with the Theatre for Social Change movement. That’s theatre that calls attention to corruption or other shitty stuff.”
“I know, Al. I know what Theatre for Social Change is. It’s really popular among underrepresented groups. It’s really big south of the border.”
“Well, she got into it. She was working on an original script that dealt with the topic of erotic asphyxiation.”
“Ew. That whole thing is just gross. If you have to strangle or be strangled to get off, you need to go back to square one and read a sex instruction manual. A little kink is fine, but cutting off the blood supply to the brain? It’s bad news.”
“You sound familiar with it.”
“I research for a living. I spend more time wading around on the sticky floors of chat rooms than most people spend walking around on real floors. You meet all kinds and hear all kinds of shit. It’s how it works. How long had she been at the theatre thing here in Chicago?”
Al looked at some notes on background. “These case files don’t say, but someone else I talked to told me she’d been around local theatre for at least twenty-five years, as well.” He was looking at the photos. “How does this look to you?” He was indicating the pictures of the death scene. There was a chair that had been tipped over sideways. It looked like it had been gently tipped over on its right two legs and had fallen to the right of where the body hung. If you reset the chair underneath the body, it would have been directly and squarely underneath the body. The front edge of the chair’s seat would have been perfectly parallel to the script that was open on the ground. A close-up of the script showed that the place in the script was just a section of inane dialogue that had nothing to do with sexual asphyxiation.
Edith looked at the photos. After a moment, she took a sip from her White Russian and said, “Bogus. Staged.”
“Why?”
“The chair was laid gently on its side on the ground or else it would have bounced at least a little. Look here…” she pointed to two dents in the shag carpet. If the chair was tipped back up, as if on hinges, the chair legs would have settled into those dents. “There’s no way a suicide is going to be that careful. I don’t buy it. This was euthanasia, murder.”
“OK. I think there’s more to look at, but on to contestant number three. The floater today, Mr. Dave Parcel.”
“Bathtub floater?”
“Goddamned if it wasn’t. He’d smoked a joint, drank a beer, and took some Vicodin before getting into a hot bath. He was found the next day by his boss, who was also a friend.”
“So the guy passed out in the bathtub?”
“There’s a missing Bose Wave Radio with multiple CD changer and a bunch of CDs missing from the collection. His boss says he wasn’t a lender, and there was one CD that was out of order, at eye level, and missing a CD. I think someone killed the guy and stole his Bose and a bunch of bitchin’ music.”
“What was the CD that was in the player?”
“I think it was disc two from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.”
“That is pretty bitchin’. How do you know there were other CDs missing?”
“The boss
said Dave Parcel was more than a little OCD. There were gaps in the CDs where someone had chosen specific CDs to steal.”
“Which CDs are missing?”
“I don’t know, but the guy from the police…”
“…your guy…”
“I don’t like to put it that way, but yeah, my guy, is gonna see if the boss can make an educated guess at what might be missing. The dude had hundreds and hundreds of CDs. He was a theatrical lighting dude, but did sound work as well as other tech work.”
“How long had he been working in the Chicago theatre world?”
“I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.”
“Twenty-five motherfuckin’ years?”
“Give or take.”
“That’s not a coincidence, Al.”
“You see, this is why I’m paying you the big bucks. So in your narrowing, did you narrow any of your searches to people that have met an untimely demise that were a part of the Chicago Theatre scene since 1990, give or take?”
“Nope. But if you give me some time and help me crunch some of this info, we can get a list pretty damn quick. I don’t mind using your Wi-Fi with your computer to do some people checks. I have an unlimited search service where I can do background checks on anyone. It’s pretty quick if you’re just doing general background, which should suffice.”
“OK, Ms. Edith. Let’s make some little groups out of this one big-ass jumble of misery.”
“Sounds good. But we break for pizza when it gets here. The thought of it is getting me a little distracted.”
“You get distracted easily?” Al asked lightly trailing his index finger down the xylophone rollercoaster of her upper spine.
“I will if you keep that up. I don’t mind. We have all night and I don’t have to be anywhere until early tomorrow morning. After one meeting, I’m free for the weekend in case you want to invite me on a little trip with you.”
“Eavesdropping, Edith? How gauche!” He feigned offence.
“Come on. Take me with you. I’ve never been to Hattiesburg. It sounds quaint.”
“It all depends. Now think very carefully about this next question. It might even have some impact on my opinion of you as a person. What are your thoughts on bacon?”
Hog Butcher: 2nd Edition Page 15